FoRK and Spam..

[Ian Andrew Bell]

On 3/18/02 3:14 PM, "Kragen Sitaker" <kragen@pobox.com> wrote:

> Perhaps I should set up a third address, fork-anonymous-archive, which
> will archive as normal but with a munged address.

Why not just munge the addresses on the web in a format that is human
readable but not easily harvested, using "bob/@/bobsworld.com" instead of
"bob@bobsworld.com"?

Or add a simple Javascript to the template for the archives that assembles
email addresses on-the-fly when a page is rendered, keeping "bob" and
"bobsworld.com" in separate variables in the HTML source for both the
mailto: HREF and the text of the email address.  That would be EASY to do,
is totally seamless from a human perspective (though it won't work with
non-Javascript browsers), and will foil any harvesting machine.

I'd love the world to read my rants as well, but the exposure to spamming
that I get from using FoRK is just plain daunting.  I can't use ian@cafe.net
anymore at all thanks to my wanton participation in early mailing lists,
etc.

Since we're all smart people but not all of us run procmail on our desktops,
there aren't exactly too many easy ways to reduce spam once it's generated.
Regardless of what technologies come along to stop spammers, an ounce of
prevention is still worth a pound of cure.

-Ian.